Above is an illustration from the video ‘Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell‘ that uses the RSA animation technique. Below are the notes highlighting key points made during the video as well as some other points drawn from additional resources. This post will be a good read for Product Owners, both new and experienced, as well as any team member on an Agile Scrum team that wants to revisit the basic principles and possibly realign their team.

Roles in Scrum

PO – Product Owner carries the vision, says no or yes to customer requests, prioritizes, and responsible for building the right thing.

SM – Scrum Master is the coach, responsible for building it fast and fast feedback cycles with the users.

Other Roles

TL – Technical Lead is responsible for building the thing right, talks closely with customers and other teams, but still encourages self organization.

Stories have an estimate for effort & value so priority = value / effort. This should make it easier for PO to prioritize Team backlog.

Velocity goes down overtime due to technical debt, architecture decisions, getting behind on automated testing. It is the team’s job to correct. However, how is this investment effort tracked? This question is asked and a lot of the sources below were found here.

Be transparent by explaining benefits of paying down technical debt so that PO can prioritize. [4]

Have a separate Improvement backlog that is internal that is adds a tax to each sprint (e.g. 10-20% of velocity). [5] [6]

Do not obsess over it, basically just pick one and fix the broken stuff already [7]. Also, consider adding to the definition of done (DoD) that the work is done only if it does not add any technical debt.

Effort should translate to time, and is influenced by uncertainty and complexity.

How much effort to get to that building? Answer for runner and cripple is one.

How much effort to get to farther away bldg? Answer for both is two, since it looks twice as far.

How much effort to get to farther away bldg where there is a chasm of lava and a small walkway? Answer for both finally agree that it is a 4, since they will have to be extra careful and may drastically slow their progress.

How much effort to get to close bldg while singing Gangnam Style? Answer for both finally agree that it is still a 1, as the extra complexity doesn’t really have an effect on the effort that causes a slowdown.

Last night, I was with some friends at a greek tapas restaurant in Washington, DC, Cava Mezze. The menu has several small plate items and everything looked delicious. We had eaten at another Cava restaurant at least once and forgot what we had ordered and what was good. That is when I wished there was an app I could pull up on my phone to see what our friends thought of particular menu items. One did not exist, but we all thought at the table how useful that would be. I had heard of startup companies starting to digitize restaurant menus so that I knew the dishes would soon be available, if not already, as APIs. We then ideated about a dozen ways we could build an app that would be useful for finding recommendations on specific menu items and dishes as well as incentivizing users to rate the food they just ate.

Here is a summary of my morning market research into the possibilities of aggregating menu information or using an app that you can quickly discover how good a particular dish is at a nearby restaurant.

I started at the programmableweb and opened up every single “food” API in a tab that mentioned food data, dish, or menu. I later looked at popular Q&A site Quora.

all menus – Has a sophisticated restaurant and menu api that offers hundreds of thousands of restaurants and you can search menus by city.

All Menus appears to be very developer friendly and even offers an interactive documentation api site. Documentation is also enhanced by Mashery and interestingly, their support contact has a grubhub address. Perhaps because their search results has buttons to online ordering that point to GrubHub.

Chow Now has an API that is private so you have to contact them for access and documentation.

food genius – A Chicago startup that started out as a “netflix for foodies” but ended up pivoting to deliver data to the restaurant industry. They get their data from other parts of the web, particularly grubhub. Checkout this video where they use their API to find the best curry in Chicago. They are involved with conferences and other food innovators at the food+technology blog site. This is where I learned that there is a lot of activity in this arena.

Food Genius encourages developers to use their API to create consumer apps and to start, they have created a website, foodgenero.us which gather’s people’s tastes on dishes and also donates to Feeding America to end hunger.

Food Genius is very developer friendly and they offer examples in python, node.js, and php. Nice work.

food spotting – This is the app that we were pretty much thinking of last night. It provides a social way to discover a dish that you want and provides a pretty easy way to review dishes. They have even gamified it through a concept called Guides that individuals can create, almost like songlists, and even offer badges for others to win if they “spot” enough of the foods on the guide. I never realized finding, eating, rating food could be loved so much.

grub hub – GrubHub appears to be the premier website and app for ordering food online. GrubHub allows you to rate a restaurant with a star system but it also shows reviews from Yelp. The ordering for each menu item is detailed and they make it a point to tell you the delivery or pickup availability. GrubHub’s home page allows you to search a location and an optional keyword for restaurant name, food genre, or food type. The search results offer a list view and a map view.

locu – This is an up and coming startup that is focused on offering restaurants easy ways to publish their menus online. I am not sure where they are getting their menu information. More information will be revealed most likely when they fully launch.

Locu has an API that is still in private or in early access mode and it used to be called menuplatform.com because that now redirects to lucu.com

open dining – Offers a platform for restaurants to create a digital menu and ordering system for us on mobiles and Facebook. This is a lot like chownow. Their API is developed and targeted towards ordering apps.

single platform – This New York company looks like it has a very strong backing and claims to be the world’s largest provider of menu items. They seem to be concentrating on signing up Washington, DC businesses because on their homepage, they highlighted a local cafe that we love, Lost Dog Cafe. This link points to a w.singlepage.com URL but interestingly enough, Lost Dog Cafe also has a GrubHub menu. I bet that the Lost Dog owners were searching for an online solution and when they checked out SinglePlatform, the singlepage was automatically created.

Singe Platform has a private API that requires registration before you get any documentation so essentially no information is available.

Conclusion

Start using foodspotter and grubhub now. Follow getfoodgenius and locu. Watch the industry as the open and platform menu players grow. Use the apps and APIs and then see where the experience falls short and consider developing an app that fulfills that need. For instance, consider an app with augmented reality that shows the highly rated items as you point your phone’s camera at a restaurant’s menu to help you decide what to order.

Menschis a German word for “human being”, but its Yiddish connotation far exceeds this definition. If you are a mensch, you are honest, fair, kind, and transparent, no matter whom you’re dealing with and who will ever know what you did. Bruna Martinuzzi, author ofThe Leader as a Mensch: Become the Kind of Person Others Want To Follow, compiled a list of ten ways to achieve menschdom. Here is Guy’s summary of her insights:

Always act with honesty.

Treat people who have wronged you with civility.

Fulfill your unkept promises from the past.

Help someone who can be of absolutely no use to you.

Suspend blame when something goes wrong and ask, “What can we learn?”

Hire people who are as smart as or smarter than you and give them opportunities for growth.

Tom Brauch and the nice guys over at FPWeb.net are hosting the sharejPoint.com website free of charge. They do so because they feel that non-profit sites like sharejPoint that promote free, open source solutions are a great benefit for the SharePoint community.

So the guys on the jPoint team have finally updated the master template to include the above banner, and I have also added the banner below to the jPoint blog page.